A guy from my course asked me on MSN today what the name of one of our seminar tutors is. At the time, I was baking fairy cakes.

Two seemingly unrelated incidents…except for one factor.

We were both avoiding writing essays. 

It amused me the way we were both doing stupid things, any things, to avoid writing another ^$%£$£ essay. I hate cooking. I never cook. I can’t cook AND won’t cook. Yet today I’ve made and decorated 15 fairy cakes (icing, melted chocolate and sprinkles), cooked a pizza and chips and made a tuna salad. I even went to Sainsbury’s to buy icing and a few other staples to avoid doing work. So I feel accomplished, but kind of guiltily so because I should’ve been at the library, or at least done more than the 1,800 words I’ve done since yesterday.

I’m watching ‘The Fat Man’s Warning’, and whilst some parts of it are good, I’ve just seen the guy make some young boys absolutely paranoid about their weight; they’re looking down at themselves and sucking their stomachs in. Ok, fat might not be good, but neither is eating disordered.

 Interestingly, though, while the 3 cities I come from are top for gun crime in the UK, they don’t even make the top 20 obese cities in the UK. Yay?

Off again on another random tangent, I’ve been missing my family a lot recently. One particular incident occurred over Easter has stuck in my mind. I was cleaning out the kitchen drawer, a funny experience because there was loads of junk in there from years ago that we pissed ourselves laughing at, such as stories my sister had written. We started arguing about something, and for some reason I said, ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’

My sister replied, ‘Jen. You’re wearing a pair of plastic Shrek ears and a t-shirt that says ‘Cool-As-A-Moose’ on it.’

I’m beginning to scare myself with the extent to which I will avoid doing work, so I will now go and write at least 200 more words.

I will.

Maybe I’ll just check LiveJournal first…   

Edit: Ok I’m now watching some idiots try to sell some product that keeps windscreens clean on cars. Yeah, I’ll be sure to buy that for when the next person tips a bucket of dye over my car. I mean, what the hell?!

I am like some crazy girl-woman.

On the one hand, people tell me I’m cute and buy me Happy Meals.

On the other hand, they also pay me to edit the code in robot manuals and ask my opinion on Derrida and deconstruction. 

So it’s really not that surprising I’m confused about who I am. And why I am. And why I’m twenty years old and spend most of my time feeling about four or about forty. I moved out of my parents’ house (70 miles/2 hours away) nearly two years ago…and yet I still like watching The Shiny Show occasionally.

The progression of the human race is something I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s come from a strange mixture of things – reading Butler and Kristeva on gender, reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (it’s a relief to have to read late Middle English rather than the Old English I studied last year), and browsing the Internet.

Part of me thinks it’s amazing that the human race has progressed so much technologically and scientifically in ways we never could have guessed - although as Derrida (I think it was) said, you can’t predict the future – if you predict the future accurately, it becomes the present and so isn’t the future at all (there are some holes in this in my opinion, however)…

Even the fact that I’m typing this and you’re reading it is pretty amazing in itself. The way that you’re interpreting it and your emotions so far are already different to mine and to what I intend in my writing, and so my writing lives and breathes and grows in a million ways, in an unlimited number of ways. Is it really still my writing?

So yes…technology and science are amazing, even though I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. Yet to some extent it makes me more in awe of things than I would be if I did understand the reasoning behind them. And to my child-like self it’s the ‘magic’ that can make things so breathtaking. We’ve progressed in the last 2,000+ years from quills to keyboards. And yet socially, the lack of progression amuses me. Yes, we’ve reached a point where we regret slavery and colonialism and we have racial awareness and (most of us) believe women should have equal rights to men. Yet beyond all this, I look back at Chaucer who was writing the Canterbury Tales around 1400 or so. I see in the stories women spending lots of money on clothes and then avoiding telling their husbands, women wanting more liberty in marriage, men complaining about women nagging them, the lack of communication between men and women and the fact that neither can understand the opposite sex and I think, has the human race really progressed that much in 600 years?

Perhaps not as much as you would expect.

I was reading something on LJ the other day about a man who refused to buy his son a pink Nintendo DS Lite (the boy wanted to be unique amongst his male friends who had them in black or white). And in that, I see the advances of technology to be able to have tiny hand-held 3D computer ‘consoles’, but at the same time I see the limitations the human race is imposing on itself socially, and probably in other ways.

So at the same time that we’re expanding our world and achieving unpredictable things, we’re also restricting our world and our views. And for every person who makes a difference in this world, there is at least one other who refuses to accept more than one point of view, one answer, who is scared by change and attempts to take control by enforcing tradition when there is very little control to take hold of, or little point in taking control.

I’ve not been setting my alarm recently, because I still technically have a week of Easter break left. On top of that, when I sleep in Nottingham, the slightest thing will wake me up. I know that if I don’t wake up when I hear Alana get up (around 7:30-8 am), then the postman will usually wake me up about 9:30. Yes, I sleep so lightly here that someone putting a letter through the door downstairs wakes me up. I can’t help it, I get defensive when I’m not at my parents’.

So today I had a bit of a lie in and got up around 8:30. Had a shower, went downstairs and got breakfast (cereal), watched a bit of tv and then settled down with my laptop to type up some notes for my stylistics assessment. I purposely try to choose essay questions that I feel are within my grasp, and I dislike vague questions…I should probably take more risks, but I like questions I feel comfortable with. Anyway, for this one we had to choose our own literature to analyse, and I’ve really outdone myself and got out of my comfort zone with the book I’ve chosen. It’s not difficult to read, it’s just difficult to analyse from a stylistics perspective, and I could well imagine spending my whole life doing various stylistical analyses of it *sigh* If I do it well though, I think it will be very rewarding, and I really need to pull my grade up on this module because I did so horrifically badly in the exam…gah.

I got bored doing work and looked around the net for cruises – we haven’t had a family holiday for a long time now, and my mum and sister are not overly keen on flying, plus I want to go somewhere new and different. Possibly lots of new somewheres. So I called my mum to tell her about one I’d found which looked pretty good, but talking my dad into it may prove more difficult! 

So I typed up my notes, had a snack of a yoghurt and then went to the nearby sandwich shop to get lunch (a tuna mayo baguette with salad, and crisps). I had to queue for a while, which I kind of expect at lunchtime, but it’s only open till about 2 pm so I guess I should have gone earlier than 12…heh.

The afternoon was spent making adjustments to my stylistics work, and then I took a book and my ipod to bed for a nap around 3 pm – no idea why I got so tired at that time?! Didn’t bother to set my alarm and sure enough, I got woken around 6 by a little kid collecting old mobile phones. Slightly strange, but whatever. After that, I did some Internet browsing, a touch more work, and then made myself dinner – Maltesers and 2 slices of wholebread bread with blackcurrant jam. So nutritional…

I was just sitting down watching Emmerdale when my lovely friend Tom rang. We had a nice chat and then I watched the rest of Emmerdale and the last half of Gladiators – bring back 1993 is what I say I’d just got back on the Internet again when my phone rang again. My friend Em had apparently entered me in for a prize draw with some modelling/photo studio in London and I’ve won this month’s. Which basically means I get 5-6 hours of a makeover, various treatments and stuff, and a photoshoot. All free, with the exception of buying actual photos, which is optional. Plus, I get to take a friend. So I’m really excited about that, but have no idea what to wear. I get to take 5-6 outfits, so I may buy some more clothes tomorrow with my non-existent money.

I called my dad, and I chatted to him and my sister for a bit, and then my new phone told me I had another call coming through, which was Hwan-Min, hoping I could set up his wireless network over the phone. Which was really not going to happen as I’m not a hardware kind of girl Plus I had enough problems with my own wireless router, so yeah.

 And I chatted to Em on MSN and she told me about a couple of pics on facebook of the photoshoot she and her friend had, and the pictures look amazing which made me more excited So yay, things to look forward to.

Since then I’ve been wasting time online, and I really need to do at least another hours’ work before I go to sleep (I’m in bed typing this!) so I will finish here and return comments quickly. I have to sign up for next year’s modules tomorrow and Sarah’s coming to stay the night as she wants to get out of Sheffield, so I need sleep.

Sorry this blog was so boring – twas a bit of an experiment..